Bill Verplank

Biography Bill Verplank

Bill Verplank is an interaction designer, human-factors engineer and visiting scholar at Stanford University. His PhD (1965-1977) is from MIT in man-machine systems with Thomas Sheridan. At Xerox (1978-1986) he participated in testing and refining the Xerox Star graphical user interface. For seven years, he taught at the ACM SIGCHI conference and participated in developing the ACM SIGCHI Curriculum recommendations. From 1986-1992, he worked as a design consultant with Bill Moggridge at IDTwo and IDEO to bring graphical user-interfaces into the product design world; he started calling it “interaction design” instead of “user-interface design”. At Interval Research (1992-2000), he directed research and design for collaboration, tangibility and music. At Stanford, during that time, he worked with Terry Winograd to establish a studio course on Human-Computer Interaction Design. Since 2000, he has been a part-time lecturer at CCRMA, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, at Stanford, teaching a course on designing input devices. He also served on the Steering Committee for the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (2000-2005). More info can be found on his website.

Engaging Encounter

The encounter took place on Friday January 16, 2015 at the d-school at Stanford University. During the same time the TEI’15 conference took place, of which Bill was the conference co-chair together with Wendy Ju.

Recent Posts

Continuing this project next to my regular work (since my sabbatical ended almost a year ago) is quite a challenge, and especially updating the website. Since the summer holidays started, I now have a bit more time to address my adventures the last half year. In 2016, I had 12 encounters up till now. in 2016.

At the top row, you see three encounters I had with designers in practice (from left to right: Afdeling Buitengewone Zaken, Less or More and Onmi) about their approaches and visions on design and design research. Moreover, I had the opportunity to have five inspiring encounters with researchers who were visiting the Computer Human Interaction conference in San Jose, CA, USA (from the 2nd row on the left to the right and downwards: George Khut, Dag Svaenas, Gerrit van der Veer, John Zimmerman and Marko Teras) about the direction HCI and design research is taking, and how this relates to social, cultural, philosophical, technological and economical developments in our society. Moreover, Pierre Lévy and I had the pleasure to have an encounter with Veronique Hillen, Dean of Paris d.school, on design thinking and design education (3rd row on the right). I met Gbolagade Ayoola, professor emeritus of Agricultural Economics and Policy and founder and president of Farm & Infrastructure Foundation, in Eindhoven and we discussed amongst other things the differences between Nigeria and Europe e.g. regarding the role of policy and technology to offer people equal rights. In August, I had a meeting with Maarten Konigs & Hans Robertus from the Holland Branding Group (4th row in the middle) to discuss participatory processes to explore the identity and branding of groups and neighbourhoods to offer people a frame and source of inspiration to act upon. Finally, I explored with Roel Freeke, the director of Necker van Naem, about the role of data, tools and social interaction to support governance and democracy processes. So the counter has reached 79.